leephillips

Vim does things at least as bad. Here’s something I wrote in 2020 that shows how the default Vim configuration can overwrite files created outside of Vim and cause autobuild systems to fail: https://lee-phillips.org/badvim/

And why my .vimrc starts with this:

    set nobackup
    set nowritebackup 
    set noundofile
    set noswapfile

I was maybe too hasty here. Another comment made me realize that the difference is due to the presence of the Latin Modern font on my desktop and its absence from my phone. Sorry, mobile browsers. You still suck, but less energetically than I had concluded.

So authors using MathML should supply the LM font for download or advise their readers.

Ah, I (the article author) am at fault here, for not pointing this out. Things looked fine in my testing because I have the LM font installed on my system.

I don’t have the data to answer your question. But I’d like to point out that it has little to do with my assertions. Note in particular the word “conveys”.

Not so good. But the problem is not Typst, it’s Chrome on Android, or the way you have that configured.

EDIT: I just checked the article on my phone, and every browser renders the equation as in your screenshot. FF and Chromium on desktop are perfect. Another example of how mobile browsers suck.

PDF serves an important purpose; it’s not an abomination. It conveys exactly what the author or publisher intended. HTML can not do this. It can serve as a reliable archive and be made (imperfectly) accessible, as described in the article. Of course all this comes with significant tradeoffs, including reduced interoperability, as you say. But there are good reasons for academic publishing, especially in math, CS, and physics (but also in some areas of the humanities) to prefer PDFs—it’s not just obstinacy.

Interesting. What browser? Because in FF or Chrome on Linux desktop, it looks basically identical to LaTeX output. But unlike when creating PDFs, you’re at the mercy of your browser’s MathML implementation (another reason PDF is great).

Not the person you’re asking, but I’ll just mention that pandoc has a Typst reader. I use a pandoc filter to write in markdown with math in Typst and convert to LaTeX:

https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters/

I see your point; you did say “only desktop”.

I use dwm. It seems to be able to handle tiled and floating windows with no problem.

That looks like an interesting program. I can hardly believe I’d never heard of it before—and it’s in the Debian repository, too.

This article is the first time I’ve heard of the reverse tab. What is it?

My keyboards have always had an INS key but they’ve never done anything and I’ve never bothered to map them to anything. I do sometimes want to overwrite, but that’s always in Vim where I can enter replace mode.

Today the great photographer Jay Maisel died: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/arts/jay-maisel-dead.html.

The sad event reminded me of the time that John Gruber took part in inciting an internet mob who vandalized the photographer’s house.